My approach: I run deep loving compassion, authenticity and an 'Art of Seeing Beauty In what is' practice through all my relationships; including my professional ones. This compassionate and authentic way of being supports you in feeling truly seen, heard, and validated for who you are and what you value. Similarly, my practice of finding the goodness, the love, the heart expression- The Art of Seeing Beauty in what is- in each action, each choice, each truth, and each person supports you to stay centred in your own inner truth, your own inner calm and trust. That feels good, it feels good to trust yourself and to navigate experiences with deep love and kindness no matter what that experience looks like on the outside.
This truly mattes so that you don't miss the beauty of the transformation in the midst of the intensity. I want you to see, to witness your magic, your power, your true beauty within any experience that you may find yourself in.
This results in you feeling you can move through intensity with intention, following your own source of strength, and in the process cultivating deep memories of trust and goodness that can be called on in future times of intensity and trail.
I walk WITH you and I offer all that I have cultivated professionally and in my own inner personal world to support your depth dive into yours.
Who I am Professionally and my evolving body of work:
​I have a B.A. in Philosophy from the U of C. From a young age I was driven by the questions that make us human: Why are we here? What is a good life? Studying Philosophy nurtured my capacity to think for myself and to trust my own process. I also studied feminist thought and Indigenous ways of knowing.
At the end of University, I realized I had a head full of knowledge and no lived experience! Thus began what would become my life long practice of meditation. This practice was the vehicle for truly understating how knowledge meets lived experience. Through meditation I came back to live in my body and my heart. It was a saving grace in my life. I became thirsty to expand my inner understanding of how to live life with less suffering and more kindness.
I travelled, encountered personal heart ache and a re-organization of what my life meant and what its purpose was to be. I yearned to be a mother yet struggled in love and relationship. I came home heart broken and broke. "What was I to do with this one precious life," as the expression goes?
It was here, in the midst of my own existential crisis, that I discovered birth work. The book "The Birth House," introduced me to a herbalist midwife who I felt was the kind of woman I wanted to be. I followed my heart impulse. I sought out Abrah Arneson, of The Green Clinic in Red Deer, Alberta, and began a Kitchen Herbalist apprenticeship. She offered me so much more than herbal knowledge. She also taught me a deeper heart based meditation practice through loving kindness, how to truly acknowledge and witness my own suffering so as to clear the way to support others, and how to believe in myself.
At this time I also trained with DONA International in the skills required to practice as a Birth Doula. This training and future certification in November 2011, guided me to community with other Doulas and lead to my first clients. I have to date attend 125 plus births. Each birth has been a gift and each family offers me something new to learn that I take forward to the next families I work with. I had found what I wanted to do with my life - and birth still forms the cornerstone of my work in the world
All further certifications and trainings were taken to support the powerful intensity of birth. However, they became their own practice and I now serve those seeking deeper connection to themselves through body work, breath work, and meditation.
For the body: Prenatal Yoga Certification with Janice Clarifeild of Vancouver, BC, Yoga Teacher Training with Lex Gillian of the Yoga Institute in Houston, Texas, Yoga Theraphy, and Thai Yoga Theraphy with Stefani of Mandorla Yoga Institute in Calgary, Alberta have all deepened my capacity to support the shifting nature of what it feels like to truly BE in our bodies.
We birth and live in our bodies- not our heads. I work with the body gently, kindly, and with the principles infused into all of Mandorla's teachings: that is, how to embody our bodies with love, how to Iive and be in the truth of our bodies at any one moment with more grace and acceptance. Ive learned to respect the bodies knowing, how to honour its truth and to work with its physiology and ancient wisdom. I use this personal knowing and professional development to support women, families, and individuals to trust the movement, the trembling, the quaking, the intensity, the bliss the truth of their body. When we honour and trust our bodies, we move with more love and kindness and with deep humility to our own strengths and weakness. We remember our inherit connection to all of life in the recognition of our body and its animal nature.
For the heart, psyhce, and soul:
I continue to explore trauma resolution, integration, and altered sates of being and receiving through my work with Trevor Yelich of Numa Somatic Therapeutics in Calgary, Alberta. Working with the interface between our body, our breath, and our psyche allows us to explore the edges of our reality, the deeper truths held in our ideas about the world and ourselves, and it provides a connection that is unwavering in times of trial and stress. I believe in the power of this practice to support working with the deep imprints, the deep patterns of behaviour, and the deep yearnings and longings we all hold as human beings.
I facilitate this work to support birthing parents in integrating their own brith trauma so as to open the way to a gentler birth for their young, to support parents postpartum to close and understand the many layers of birth so that they can move into parenthood with clarity and purpose, and to support any breather with an opportunity to know themselves and their multi-dimensional nature.
BreathWork brings us to our truth, it brings us to our own knowing. It supports our surrender and acceptance towards this grand journey we call life.
I am honoured to facilitate these unfoldments for all who work with me as their breath facilitator.
Who I am personally and how that supports you: I am a fellow traveler on this earth and in this life. I practice service to others as a birth keeper, a breath facilitator, and a body worker. I am a care giver and I practice offering nourishment to the body, heart, and soul. I am authentic, real, raw, true. I treat you with respect, consideration, and kindness. I accept responsibility and offer you the best of what and who I am at the time you meet me. I am continually striving to bring more compassion and love into all that I do and am in the world.
I am a daughter, a woman, and a life mate. I live in Calgary, Alberta with my Life Partner, Mark. I dream of having my own children, home schooling them, and finally having that huge garden and country home I see in my mind. I am always reading and in the pursuit of further understating of how to deepen my meditation practices, uncovering the wondrous world of pre-conception, conception, gestation, birth, parenthood and the imprinting found here, and how to work somatically with trauma and shock. I am currently working with past clients to compile their birth stories into a book about birth and Motherhood and the forgotten cultural respect towards these roles/experiences. I love cooking and food and can be found in the kitchen constantly. I trust herbal medicine and holistic therapies for all of my aliments, yet I respect modern medicine when it doesn't think its the end all and be all. I respect humility wherever it is found and I seek my own humility constantly.
My personal commitment to a daily meditation practice, yearly meditation retreats and workshops, my current research and study in pre- and perinatal psychology with Myrna Martin of Nelson, BC, and my continuing work and study with Mandorla Yoga Institute, Numa Somatic Therapeutics, and other groups, all support me in continuing to offer you deeper, more knowledgeable and kinder care. I live that which I facilitate. In my walk with you, I truly walk with you. We walk together in this one life.
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti.